As a very rough rule of thumb: In a competitive situation, prices tend
towards costs plus some profit margin. In monopoly situations, a
profit seeking monopolist tries to maximize their profits by pricing
at the "benefit" to the customer minus just enough to give the
customer some incentive to buy.
A customer with a NAT arguably gets some more benefit from the network
connection than a customer with just one computer hooked up. If their
provided can successfully impose a substantially higher price on the
NAT customer even when the provider's costs are the same, I would take
this as evidence that the provider was exploiting monopoly power to
increase their profits.
Donald
From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony(_at_)atkielski(_dot_)com>
Message-ID: <00ba01c17856$7fd21700$0a00000a(_at_)atkielski(_dot_)com>
To: <erosen(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>, "Fred Baker" <fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Cc: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
References: <200111282028(_dot_)PAA13955(_at_)erosen-u10(_dot_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:49:03 +0100
Eric writes:
The cable companies want to charge per computer
...
Why? Their costs are based on the amount of capacity used, not the number of
computers connected. A transfer volume of 1 GB per month costs the company the
same whether it is carried out by one computer or ten computers.